On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (40 page)

O
N
THE
drive home, Franklin tried to organize his stormy, muddled thoughts. Tory came from Chicago. Of Swedish ancestry. His parents owned a boarding house and a bakery. Walt Whitman was his favorite poet. And the last name. No getting around that one. All the same as Torsten P.’s.

Madame Lafourchette had said Tory had inquired about him even before they had set eyes on each other. Too much for a coincidence.

At the cabin, Franklin retrieved the letters Torsten P. had written him, which he still kept stowed in his old Army trunk. Next, he dug among Tory’s belongings in a chest of drawers and uncovered the journal he’d kept throughout the winter. Tory’s handwriting and Torsten P.’s were identical. Straightforward and unembellished.

Everything coalesced into concrete recognition. Doubt no longer lingered. Tory showing up unexpectedly at the homestead. His lack of curiosity of Franklin’s life because he already knew so much about him from reading his letters.

And, of course, Tory, in his silence after Franklin had confronted him in Spiketrout, had admitted to his scheme.

Tory Pilkvist and Torsten P. were the same person.

Sickness gurgled inside him, worse than when Army doctors cut off his arm. Now, something far greater had been severed from him.

What worthless solace came from realizing that Torsten P. had not rejected him. She had never existed. And, in some appalling way, neither had Tory.

Impostors like Tory were the reason why he’d hidden himself away in the mountains. He’d exposed his soul in those letters to Torsten. Yet he had received nothing in return but pain. Tory had played him like a hand at a faro table. And it was Franklin who had lost.

To think he had given himself to Tory at the Gold Dust Inn in a way that no man would ever consider. How could he have been so gullible? So desperate to allow a demon to lure him into his den?

He clenched Tory’s journal, about to chuck it into the still smoldering oven, but he shoved it into Tory’s satchel instead, followed by his other belongings. Fuming, he stomped to the gate and, with a solid one-handed windup, heaved the bag over the barbwire.

Wicasha watched Franklin from the barn, where he looked to be currying his gelding. Franklin refrained from making any eye contact with him. Wicasha, astute enough to find his way in the pitch darkness without the aid of a torch, knew better than to bother Franklin in his present state.

Yet the remainder of the day, Wicasha lingered at the homestead, as if discerning he needed to stand guard by his friend. The notion both irritated and reassured Franklin. Wicasha remained silent, only speaking when necessary. But later that night, as they sat at the cabin table eating leftover stew that Tory had made (how bitter it tasted), Wicasha finally asked Franklin why he had abandoned Tory among the people of Spiketrout.

“There is no Tory. There is no Torsten,” Franklin said, the food tasteless and dry in his mouth.

“Frank, speak plainly with me.”

Franklin stood with a harsh skid of his chair on the wood floor. He traipsed behind the wood partition. A few seconds later, he returned with the letters sent to him by Thomas Persson and the other ones Torsten P. had written him, and slapped them on the table.

“There. Go ahead. Read them.”

Wicasha eyed the letters, his face smooth and calm. Slowly, he reached for them. One by one, he thumbed through the letters, his expression passive and thoughtful. Eventually, he began to read, skipping every other two or three.

Franklin turned his back to him. “I placed an advertisement,” he said, his voice low and hoarse, “in one of those foolish matchmaker periodicals. I didn’t want you to know. Didn’t want anyone to know. I was looking for a mail-order bride, I confess. I thought I had found one. We wrote back and forth for months, all during the spring and most of the summer. I fell in love with her through those letters. Then they suddenly stopped. I waited and waited, rode back and forth to Spiketrout four times a week like an idiot to check at the postal office. You must remember how often I was going into town, Wicasha. Well, that’s why. I did it for her.” He began to pace. “Turns out, Torsten, the girl from Chicago to whom I had given my heart, doesn’t exist. She was a joke concocted by Tory. Yes, that’s right. Tory was the one who had written me from Chicago the entire time, proclaiming those things I had assumed came from a woman named Torsten. To further his hoax, he traveled all the way from Chicago to Spiketrout just to ridicule me. Remember how you found him in the barn loft? There he waited for discovery so he could trick me, needle his way into my life, string me along like a jackass. And how he succeeded.”

Franklin, panting with anguish, stopped pacing and faced a barren corner of the cabin. Suddenly ashamed Wicasha had learned the truth, he formed a tight fist and froze in disgust. The rumple of Wicasha turning the pages of the letters sounded like chalk dragging against a blackboard. But didn’t Franklin deserve the humiliation? Appropriate punishment for entrusting his future to a periodical? Franklin wandered to a chair by the door, where he sat, slumped, clenching his fist between his quaking legs. Wicasha finally placed the last letter on top of the others and nudged them aside.

“I’m sorry, Frank.”

His words were enough to send a shock through Franklin’s system. The reality of his calamity descended over him like a thick rain, drenching him in despair. He hunched forward until his knuckles touched the floor. The misery no longer perched solely in his mind. He had shared his dark secret with another. Wicasha’s knowledge of the whole affair solidified his disgrace and hopelessness.

He stood, rigid, and pushed the chair over. Heat burning his ears and eyes, he stormed from the cabin and headed into the far reaches of his land, past the storage barn and the field where the irrigation ditches still needed a good cleaning, to a hillock, where he stood on top and peered around his homestead under the cloudy afternoon sky. He heard the hogs jostle and squeal in the pen. The hens rattled. Wind parted the alfalfa growing along the edge of the field. What had at one time brought him joy now brought him gloom. He loathed his homestead. Loathed every inch of it, barbwire and all. The entire Black Hills had turned against him.

Later that night when Franklin lay alone in his feather bed, sleep taunted him. He kicked at the sheets, clutched the mattress, fumed at the ceiling in his misery. He could smell Tory (or should he refer to him as Torsten?) enmeshed in the bed sheets. He balled his sheets and threw them into a corner. He cursed heaven for mocking him.

He jumped from bed and paced the cabin, the wood floor cold and callous beneath his bare feet. Under a flickering gas lantern, he forced himself to reread the letters Thomas Persson had sent him—the ones Franklin had sent Torsten P. He had wanted to toss the bundle at Tory while he had sat in his wagon in Spiketrout, accusing the lying rascal of his crime. But why let him have the satisfaction of reading them? His tender expressions were meant for someone who had never breathed life, never walked the earth. And he had wanted to marry that illusion? Even worse, he had wanted to share a bed with Tory, the master of that falsehood, for the remainder of his life.

A duplicitous villain had deceived him—Tory Pilkvist and Torsten P. One creature, cloven in half, had achieved the destructive undertaking of two.

He screamed, bellowed into the night, revealing to the world his anguish in one continuous heartfelt roar. And after he stopped, his cry lingered, carrying over the Hills far and wide, riding on the wind rushing off the mountain peaks. Then he realized—no echo chased after his screams. Somewhere near Moonlight Gulch, a lone wolf was howling at the world. Franklin cried out again. His and the wolf’s sorrows formed into one vortex of agony.

If Tory had shot him, the pain would have proved less severe.

“I know how you feel,” Franklin shouted at the wolf howling into the night. “I know. I know.” Sobs stole away his voice. He broke down, his body convulsing. He wondered if he might die from the relentless spasms. He wouldn’t care if he did.

T
WO
days after the horrible revelation, Wicasha informed Franklin that Bilodeaux and Burgermyer’s trial was set for Friday. When the day came, Franklin traveled with Wicasha to the Gold Dust Inn, where the trial was to be held. He shuddered at thinking he’d have to face Tory. During the trial, he did his best to avoid his crystal-blue eyes. In a moment of weakness, he glanced at him. He regretted the rash move as soon as he noticed his red, swollen eyes. Only briefly did he wonder where he’d been staying, what he’d been doing. Three hours of agonizing deliberations passed before the jury declared Bilodeaux, Burgermyer, and the third accomplice, Jack Parker, guilty of kidnapping, extortion, and bodily assault. The verdict failed to lift the desolation cemented in Franklin’s soul. Judge Blanchard sentenced Bilodeaux, Burgermyer, and Parker to the maximum—seven years at the territorial prison in Bismarck.

Franklin left immediately after the judge uttered the sentence. He resented Wicasha when he told him on the drive home that he had already visited Tory on two occasions and had carried his satchel to him. When Wicasha tried to relay to Franklin that Tory meant no harm in coming to the Black Hills, Franklin silenced him.

As the days passed, Franklin transformed his anger into energy to focus on his homestead. It was spring. Much work was needed to keep the homestead functioning. Wicasha, as usual for the time of year, stopped by regularly to help with the new crop of carrots, onions, potatoes, and green beans. At last, they cleaned the mud and debris from the irrigation ditches. Together they repaired the hole the heavy winter snowfall had left in the roof of the barn.

Wicasha remained silent about Tory while they toiled side by side, even when Franklin had known he’d traveled back to Spiketrout after the trial, most likely to meet with the Chicagoan again. The stillness covered them like an itchy blanket. Days of choring left Franklin exhausted. He relished his burning muscles and knotted neck. But his bitterness toward Tory never waned.

A grazing mule deer seemed somehow sinister with its large dark eyes. A rare black bear emerged from the woods like a demon from hell. Franklin got no satisfaction from cultivating the land, refurbishing the barn, henhouse, and pigpen after the long winter. He was sickened by the squeal of the newly born piglets and the sight of their greedy, ravenous suckling.

Franklin resented Tory for snatching his awe for nature from him.

He now even considered panning for the gold in the creek pool. What a joke that would be on Bilodeaux! Now that the bandit was imprisoned, Franklin would do what the greedy French Canadian had long wanted. What did it matter to Franklin if he succumbed to the greed, the wanting of more and more until it transformed him into a drunken beast who lived only for more easy-gotten loot?

A part of his humanity had already deserted him anyway.

He reread the letters Torsten had written him last spring and summer for no reason other than to see if he had missed something. Had Torsten’s mastery of deception blinded him from realizing the letters had been written by the hand of a male prankster? Through one letter after the next, all seven of them, he failed to distinguish between Torsten P., the woman, and Tory, the man who had robbed him of dignity. They even smelled like Tory.

Seething, he kicked the letters across the room, where they lay scattered like leaves churned in a wind.

He fumed, remembering how he had rejected the other responses to his advertisement. Dozens of others had written him. He wondered how different his life might be if he had responded to one of their letters instead of Torsten’s. A tear fell hot against his cold cheek. He wanted to toss the letters into the fire, but he held back.

Why couldn’t he burn them? Why couldn’t he end that terrible chapter in his life and simply toss them into the fire and incinerate all his pain?

T
EN
days after Franklin abandoned Tory in Spiketrout, Wicasha finally spoke to Franklin in his familiar straightforward manner. They were sitting outside by the fire under the nighttime sky after a hard day working the field. Franklin, leaning against a tree stump, whittled a spoon out of a fallen pine branch, while Wicasha sipped coffee at the roughhewn table.

“Frank,” he said, setting down his coffee, “you once asked me why I turned against my own people in the war against the Sioux. I gave you my best answer. I was angry they had tossed me aside like an outsider and stole away my lover, Bua Ishte. Why did
you
turn against your people in the Civil War?”

“My people?”

“Southerners like you. Southern states surrounded you, yet you went against them, defended the Union.”

“In Knox County, most of us sought secession,” Franklin said into the fire. The flames burned his eyes, but he welcomed the gritty sensation. “We despised the Democrats and their pro-slavery. If you opposed us, we considered
you
a traitor.” He glanced at the dark, starless sky and chuckled. “I guess even among outcasts, there are outcasts.”

“But you were still surrounded by states loaded with people loyal to the Confederacy. Even the majority of Tennesseans loathed your Republican loyalties. You understand what it’s like to face scorn,” Wicasha said. “We both do. You have to remember that when you try to understand why Tory did what he did. A man like Tory will always live in an environment where he is an outsider, surrounded by those who detest him. He’ll always be peering in at the world from behind bushes. Where most people find each other out in the open, Tory must search in secret places.”

“There never was anyone named Tory.” Franklin spit into the fire. A fierce hiss lashed back at him. “Or Torsten, for that matter.”

“Frank, my point is, for Tory, growing up the way he is, well, there aren’t many ways for him to find true love.” Wicasha gripped his coffee cup, his eyes transfixed on the liquid. “You can find physical needs about anywhere—hurdy-gurdy houses, desperate soldiers, or cowboys lonely for women. It’s not unusual to come by. But love? That’s another thing altogether. For men like me and Tory, it’s a treasure rarer than opal stone.”